


Un Hombre Bueno

by mynameisnemo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Music, Season/Series 03, Stanford Era, Wee!chesters, teen!chesters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 16:53:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4312890
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mynameisnemo/pseuds/mynameisnemo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam wasn’t sure if it was a bizarre sense of homesickness, or maybe it was the challenge in the advisor's eyes, daring him to go outside his comfort zone.  Either way he nodded after a minute of consideration.  “Sure, <i>Magic, Rituals, and Religion</i>, sounds perfect."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Un Hombre Bueno

**Author's Note:**

> "Alacran, del desierto,  
> sin saber mataste a un hombre bueno.  
> Con tu colita, llena de veneno,  
> cayo un hombre de vestido de negro.  
> Sin saber mataste a el pistolero."  
> Alacran y Pistolero  
> Chingón

In Sam’s fall semester of his junior year at Stanford he goes to his advisor and finds that he’s on track to graduate on time but needs one more humanities credit to complete his minor degree plan. The rest of his course load is pretty standard, a track Kineseology credit, pre-law classes, and one humanities credit for which he’d forgotten to account. 

“It’s good, actually,” Ms. Brooks said, using her mouse to scroll through the course catalogue on the massive computer screen in front of them on her desk. “With the P.E. cred and the humanities cred you are looking at an easy spring semester. It’ll give you time to study to take the LSAT in the fall like we talked about.” 

Sam nodded, eyes on the course options scrolling down the screen. 

“So what do you think?” she asked, snapping her gum. “Do you like geography? Philosophy? Anthropology?”

“Hold on,” Sam said, straightening from his slouch in the flimsy rolly chair that felt like it was going to throw him on the ground at any second. “Go back up.”

She scrolled up a couple times and he pointed, careful not to smudge the screen, “ _Magic, Rituals, and Religion_?”

She clicked the title, taking them to the course description. “Sure, that would work.” She snapped her gum again and Sam wondered how she could chew it with the braces that pushed her lips out, made her smile seem kind of dorky. “You like that kind of thing? I took it my freshman year. It’s a weird class, but fun and easy if you’re interested in the subject matter. Not great if you’re uber Christian though. You gotta keep an open mind.” 

Sam wasn’t sure if it was a bizarre sense of homesickness; it had been a year since Dean had last called, drunk off his ass and angry and sad, last November. He’d demanded to know where Sam got off just up and leaving, why he was so much better than the dwindling members of his already tiny family. The conversation hadn’t ended well. 

Maybe it was the challenge in Ms. Brooks’s eyes, the way she kept snapping her gum and raising an eyebrow at him. 

Either way he nodded after a minute of consideration. “Sure, sounds perfect. Will it fit in my class schedule?”

\- - -

The professor was kind of a weird guy, weedy and grey, with hippy clothes and a habit of coming into the class early to play music before starting the lecture. Sometimes he would ask the students if anyone knew the song he was playing that day.

It was an arena class but Sam knew he’d been picked out at the beginning, the day he caught himself nodding along to Aqualung by Jethro Tull. 

The thing was, Dean had loved that song in his sophomore year of high school, had played that album so many times Dad had threatened to throw the tape out the window. Sam had loved it too though, the way the music alternated between weird, echoey singing, like a badly tuned radio and then loud, lewd lyrics and driving guitar riffs. 

Dean had gotten his driver’s license that year and he loved to time it so he would pull up to stop lights, with the windows down and the music blasting. He’d sit in the driver’s seat with the bench pulled all the way up because he hadn’t hit his growth spurt yet, the music crooning softly. _”You poor old sod, you see it’s only me…”_ Then he’d peel out when the light turned green. _”Do you still remember, December’s foggy freeze...”_

Sam could still remember how it felt like they were leaving the music hanging in the hair behind them, like the smoke of the cigarettes that Dean sometimes snuck when Dad was out of town on a hunt and Dean needed to relax a little. 

Sam knew he stood out even more when the professor, a guy from Minnesota, was talking about the cultural differences in the U.S. regarding gun ownership. The professor, Frost “like the Norse Winter god, not the poet” he had joked the first day of class, had taught in Texas before moving to California. He said he’d taken the same poll in every class he’d taught. He asked how many students grew up with a gun in the house, then three guns, then five, then more than ten guns in the house. Over the fading strings of a Zydeco song Sam could only associate with his last semester of middle school in Slidell, Louisiana, Sam knew he was one of only a few students who still had their hand up at the end of the poll and Professor Frost had raised his eyebrows, keeping eye contact for a moment before moving on. 

Sam had no idea why he’d been honest about the answer during the poll when he’d spent the last three years lying and hiding and rewriting his own past to everyone he met. Still, the victor wrote the history books, right? And he had escaped from the nightmare, from the drill sergeant, from the ranks of the sad army battling the shadows for no reward. 

Not long after the poll Sam realised it had been just over a month since classes had started for the semester and he was completely absorbed in the material, far beyond the minimum effort it would take to pass with a grade good enough to keep his GPA. He’d even made a date out of one lecture, with the nursing student from across the apartment complex, taking her along one morning when she mentioned that her lecture had been cancelled and she had a free period. 

They’d gone for coffee afterwards and argued for an hour about Jim Jones, Waco, and cult mentality. They’d walked back to campus holding hands and she had sang Nina Simone’s Gin House Blues loud and proud and so beautiful in the California sun. She was beautiful, funny, intelligent, and Sam had to stop himself from doing something stupid like entertaining the thought that Jessica might be the prettiest name in the world. It didn’t stop him from programming his phone to ring with the Allman Brothers Band when she called though. He’d blame that one on Dean for being a bad influence.

\- - -

Dean would play classic rock all day, every day. He’d play it loud and angry or soft and soothing or just as background to making breakfast, driving, taking care of the car. Sam had always thought that the reason Dean liked The Beatles was because of mom. He wouldn’t even dare to leave something like With a Little Luck by The Wings on when dad was around. Of course they listened to other music because of dad. Sometimes Sam’s ears felt muffled for hours after listening to Dad and Dean belt out Miss You, out of key and out of tune but always with so much defiant joy, laughing through the whoo-hoo-hoo parts, cracking each other up.

The day Sam walked into class to hear the walking rhythm of a blues guitar and a deep voice moaning to a woman, asking her where she slept last night, he almost turned around and walked back out. 

The blues, the roots of the music Dean listened to so freely, that was personal. That was the music he played when Sam was at school, when he was sad, when he missed mom. There was something about the blues that made Sam want to turn around and walk away, drop the class, toss the four page analysis on burial rites in five different cultures in the trash and not look back. The blues had been Dean’s own discovery, a language that hadn’t been taught to him by dad but seemed to have been burned into his bones by fire, etched into his very being by a lifetime spent on the road, longing for something he knew he’d never get to have. 

Instead, Sam waited by the door, waited until the last angry, sad, plaintive _”oo-ooh”_ faded away before he could make himself walk in and take his seat.

\- - - 

Sam had taken Spanish in high school. It had been the only foreign language offered in the tiny resort town in New Mexico they’d been living in when he started his freshman year and one he had started it he saw no reason to deviate. It was close to Latin, closer than the German or French offered routinely at most other high schools he had the misfortune of attending. It was also useful in his everyday life as well. Due to this, and the fact that he had to graduate high school with a 4.5GPA in an effort to get the scholarship funding that would afford him a chance at Stanford and a normal life, he could test out of the first two semester of language credit that were required by his degree plan. He could also order food at any Mexican restaurant or panadería in California. It was a useful skill, though he found it slightly annoying the day it meant he got the song Professor Frost played stuck in his head, a constant background to the material in the lecture.

They were talking about trance states and how to induce them. Sleeplessness was one, meditation another. It was when drugs were brought up that Sam found himself on familiar territory once again. 

Dean had always had a wild streak. It didn’t come out in questioning Dad’s orders or wanting a life outside of hunting, at least, not that Sam had ever seen. Still, it was there. 

It was there Sam’s sophomore year of high school. Dean had dropped out that January, turning eighteen and declaring he was done with formal education in a way that declared he was a _man_ now. He’d only been a junior when he dropped out, somehow losing a year between all the schools they’d been to in the thirteen years since mom was killed. Sam never doubted that Dean was smart, knew his older brother’s dropping out had been more frustration and feeling like public schooling wasn’t going to get him any closer to a normal life than he already was. Still, dropping out had sparked something in Dean, the freedom, the threshold of adulthood, the keys to the impala for ‘graduation’ that made Dean a little wild for a while. 

They were stuck in Odessa that spring, birthdays and newfound manhood aside when chupacabra induced knee injuries were considered. Dean was 19 and stifling in what passed for winter in West Texas and Sam was just hoping Dad didn’t decide it was time to move before school ended in May. 

Sam was never sure, later, if it was prudence or hunter’s watchfulness or just needing a designated driver, but the night Dean decided to join the group of dropouts and going no where native kids on their adventure into the desert he’d dragged Sam with him. 

Dean had been pretty drunk when Sam came home from school that Friday, half a dozen crushed Tecate cans and a crumpled pack of Camels littering the driveway. Still, he had plans and nothing, not even being too drunk to drive, was going to keep him from venturing into the desert. The local kids he’d been hanging out with, Michael and Roberto and Rose, were expecting him and he was not going to disappoint. Especially not Rose. 

Sam had loaded his backpack with DD batteries and a flashlight and half the textbooks he’d hauled home from school, intent on getting something useful done, and followed Dean’s instructions out down the dark, plain, desert county roads until they found the turn off where Dean’s friends were waiting. 

Sam stayed in the car while Dean smoked pot and drank more illicitly purchased Tecate and danced like a heathen around a campfire in the middle of what seemed like untamed desert. 

There were coyotes howling in the background, barely audible over the tejano music Michael was blasting from the ‘68 Impala lowrider he had painted electric blue. 

Sam found out later, in his class, so far removed from that night, that they had been in peyote country. It was the only place in the world that peyote naturally grows, and the bits of cactus that Dean and his friends had chewed up, spitting the ground up rinds on the sandy desert ground and into the fire, were full of mescaline. 

Dean had been almost feral that night, free from the things that usually kept him so grounded, so tethered to his role as Sammy’s older brother. He had danced around half naked, easily a half a foot taller than his companions, and possessed. Not like demon possessed, but filled with the freedom of smoking cactus and being untameable in the middle of a nowhere Texas desert. 

Sam drove home later, the radiant sun rising on the empty passenger seat next to him, Dean passed out snoring in the backseat, and years later he would hear the words to a song he’d first heard in a sterile lecture hall in Palo Alto, California, and he would think that maybe there was a mythos to his older brother that he’d seen one night in a flicking campfire light in a desert that had been been taught at Stanford. 

_”Una noche muy hermosa,_  
_Se bajo de su caballo_  
_A mirar las estrellas_  
_A recordar su madre”_

\- - -

Much later, Sam would reflect in a pagan god’s dining room, that it was a good thing he’d paid attention to the class. Dean could laugh and joke all he liked about Sam’s college education, and boy he had for the first year, but it had been a heated argument with one of his classmates, a girl with a thick Louisiana accent and a pentacle tattoo on the back of her neck, that had clued him in about the meadowsweet that eventually led them to the source of the Christmas disappearances. Sam spent the rest of the evening with Clifton Chenier stuck in his head along with the cheesy carols from which he couldn’t seem to get away.

Later that night, head swimming from a little too much eggnog, Sam would think about Professor Frost, about Stanford, and think it was possible that one anthropology class taken on a whim had helped more people, _saved more people_ , than all of his law classes combined probably ever would have. He thought, for a moment in a dark motel room in Ypsilanti, Michigan, about expressing that thought. 

Then Dean grunted in his sleep and flopped from his side to his stomach; heavy, intoxicated breathing snuffing into the pillow. Sam thought about how few nights of really relaxed, uninterrupted sleep Dean had left before May 2nd rolled around. There wasn’t even half a year left and Dean wouldn’t get many more nights like this in his life, the way things were going. Sam kept his eyes on the ceiling where the Christmas lights were streaking multicoloured across the popcorn paint like a Jackson Pollock painting, and kept his mouth shut. He let his brother sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> The song for which this fic is named and was originally dreamt up, is about a pistolero, a hero gunslinger who is killed in the desert one night by a scorpion. It's a beautiful song and one I have loved for years and years and it also makes me think a lot of Dean when I hear it. I can't find a translation of the lyrics that conveys the poeticism of the original lyrics so I'm not going to try to put a translation here. 
> 
> There is also a fic-mix for this fic on 8tracks here: [Un Hombre Bueno](http://8tracks.com/mynameisnemo/un-hombre-bueno/edit)


End file.
